Alexander Payne Did Not Set Out to Make a Movie About Our Times

With Downsizing, the acclaimed director of Election and Sideways delivers a satire of Swiftian proportions.

Alex Pappademas

Nov 28, 2017

We have been on the record for just under ten minutes when Alexander Payne stops and says, “I just want to tell you, my brain’s working a little slowly today. I’ve had a very long week. Got a little drunk last night. Got a little bit of a headache today. So I’m not in top form.”

We’re out on the deck at the Inn of the Seventh Ray in Topanga, California. It’s a Saturday in mid-July, the morning is blue and mild, and over the railing behind us a little creek sparkles in its bed. The setting is so perfect I feel like we should be tasting different kinds of wedding cake. Payne is wearing grayish jeans, suede oxfords with electric-blue soles, and a white linen shirt; he is fifty-six and professorially handsome, with a long nose that makes him look like Lord Byron in one of those portraits where you can tell Byron really knew which was his good side. He’s been racing to complete his seventh feature, an uncharacteristically high-concept sci-fi comedy called Downsizing, in time to screen it at film festivals in Toronto and Venice in September. They finished recording the musical score last night and popped “a bunch of Champagne” to celebrate, and a longish evening ensued. He’s been on seven-day weeks; in an ideal world, he’d get to spend today lying low and recuperating instead of being performatively delightful in an interview about the new movie, which you can tell he isn’t quite sure how to describe or discuss just yet.

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The initial reaction to Downsizing after Toronto and Venice and subsequent press screenings will be impassioned but variegated; depending on whom you’re reading, it’s either an incisive and ambitious satire or an intriguing concept frustratingly executed. Its mix of schlub naturalism and toy-box invention has plenty of recent precedent in the work of Spike Jonze and Mike Judge, but it’s a significant departure from the approach that’s made Payne a critical darling among partisans of the Kind of Films They Just Don’t Make Anymore.

Strictly speaking, all of Payne’s movies have been comedies, but over the years his work has begun to feel like an on-going experiment in how small and spare and quiet and loss-suffused a comedy can be before it loses its claim to the genre. His breakthrough film, 1999’s Election, is his most antic, employing bursts of non- diegetic pop music, freeze-frame, and multiple voice-over narrators to tell the story of a high school teacher (Matthew Broderick, as Ferris Bueller’s worst nightmare of beaten- down adulthood) at war with a rabidly ambitious student (Reese Witherspoon); his most recent movie, 2013’s Nebraska, with Bruce Dern and Will Forte, was still funny, but looked and felt bare-branch minimal, like a WPA photo.

Downsizing, due in theaters at the end of the year, is, contrarily enough, Payne’s most maximal movie; one way of understanding how maximal is to note that originally it was supposed to begin and end with a sequence set thousands of years in the future, in which cave-dwelling children beg their mothers and fathers to tell them once again the story of Paul Safranek, the character played by Matt Damon in the film’s present-day sequences. These scenes were cut, in part because the film had another prologue—which did make the final version—in which a Norwegian scientist reveals that he’s perfected a process by which humans can be reduced in height to around five inches.

Downsizing is, contrarily enough, Payne’s most maximal movie.

It’s a technological breakthrough with seemingly transformative implications for a resource-strapped planet, but by the time we flash-forward ten years and the story of Paul and his wife, Audrey (Kristen Wiig), begins, downsizing has mostly become a way for middle-class Americans to enjoy a life of luxury at a fraction of the cost. Paul is a dedicated but cash-strapped occupational therapist who sees to the orthopedic needs of meat cutters at an Omaha Steaks plant; he and Audrey decide to get small after discovering that their modest nest egg will buy them a mini McMansion in a New Mexico “microcommunity” called Leisureland.

After a shrinking sequence set in a series of Kubrickian clean rooms, the movie takes the first in a series of sharp turns best left unspoiled. Leisureland’s scale-model America turns out to have replicated all the bigger one’s ills and inequities and nagging soul-sicknesses, right down to its economic dependence on the exploitation of tiny immigrant laborers, and in this way it’s exactly the type of CGI-aided sci-fi movie you’d expect from Payne, modern cinema’s foremost observer of human fecklessness. But there’s also a new depth of feeling here, and a degree of compassion that the Alexander Payne of a few years ago would probably have viewed as contraindicated to the making of Alexander Payne comedies.

Laura Dern, who starred as an inhalant-addicted single mother in Payne’s first feature, the 1996 abortion-debate satire Citizen Ruth, is all for this interpretation. “I think he might just be getting more tenderhearted about his characters,” she says. “I think he’s letting them in a little bit. My dream would be to sit next to him while he watches Citizen Ruth and have him shed a tear for poor Ruth Stoops.”

Payne and his longtime writing partner, Jim Taylor, started working on the script for Downsizing way back in 2006, right after 2004’s Sideways made a pile of money and won Payne and Taylor an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. It seemed like the right moment to take a big swing. Then there were complications.

Matt Damon and Alexander Payne on the set of Downsizing.

Paramount Pictures

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“It took us years to write this damn screenplay,” Payne says. “It became a Vietnam of screenplays. We went all sorts of different directions. We had a 250-page, almost a 300-page draft, and we had to corral that. It’s more of an idea for a miniseries, but we wanted to make it a movie.”

“They always give me their scripts early on,” says editor Kevin Tent, who’s cut every Payne film since Citizen Ruth. After they sent him the first sixty pages of Downsizing, Tent says, “I said, ‘This is great—where are you guys going with it?’ And they’re like, ‘We don’t know!’”

Once they did chisel a screenplay out of the sprawl and began shopping it in 2009, they found that no one wanted to finance it. After that, Payne says, “I was just desperate to make a film,” so he made 2011’s The Descendants—which won Payne another Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, shared with Nat Faxon and Jim Rash—and then, two years later, Nebraska. “And I did a TV pilot, too”—for HBO’s Hung, with Thomas Jane as a desperate man with a huge schlong—“just to beat up on actors for a few weeks,” Payne says.

Damon says that even after he agreed to star in Downsizing, it wasn’t enough to lock in a green light; ultimately Payne decided to push the project another year. “If you go [to a studio],” he explains, “and say, ‘Okay, this is a big-budget movie, and it’s about human beings interacting with one another, and there’s never going to be a sequel,’ that’s, like, the worst pitch ever.”

“I guess I have to trust fate,” Payne says, “because a lot of the elements of the screenplay have more significance now: the wall that surrounds Leisureland, and the [fact that] the Mexicans and Central Americans who work in Leisureland live on the other side of that wall. We had no idea that the wall would acquire significance.”

Paramount Pictures

Payne acknowledges that he’s made a movie that is, to some extent, “a pastiche of the times”—an absurdist sci-fi prism on immigration, income inequality, and climate change. But he doesn’t want to elaborate on how or why that happened. He doesn’t want to plant a thesis in anybody’s head. And you get the feeling he wants even less to be the kind of director who makes bold claims in magazines about how topical and trenchant his work is.

He murmurs affirmatively when it’s suggested that Payne’s movies are all, in one way or another, about men either realizing they’re not going to get what they’ve always believed was coming to them—literary success, a lotto jackpot, a contented retirement, or an acting job that doesn’t involve reading ad copy for ED medication—or simply being stripped of old certainties and inflicting the resulting feelings of disenfranchisement on the world. But he doesn’t want to weigh in on whether these films constitute an accidental psychological profile of the type of person who voted in the last presidential election for the candidate who promised to restore white men to their proper place at the center of the universe. All he says when this notion is floated is, “Why would I dismiss your point of view about things?”

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Payne’s movies are all about men either realizing they’re not going to get what they’ve always believed was coming to them.

Revisited in a post-2016 context, Election looks more than ever like the definitive film about Hillary Clinton’s presumption and the apoplectic resentment she arouses in (not all) men, but Payne swears that’s not what he and Taylor were going for when they adapted Tom Perrotta’s 1998 novel for the screen. Both Citizen Ruth and Election, he says, were merely supposed to be explorations of the way personal psychodramas play out in a public arena. “We’re certainly seeing that now to the nth degree,” Payne concedes. But the current administration hasn’t fired him up as a satirist; if he were asked to pitch a Trump movie, Payne would decline. “I don’t want to look at the reality; I don’t want to look at it in a movie,” he says. “The whole thing is hideous.” For what it’s worth, Payne says President Obama told him—twice—that Election is his favorite political film; Payne’s are Dr. Strangelove and Michael Ritchie’s The Candidate. (“That’s a beautiful film.”)

In 1975’s Notes on the Cinematograph, the French arch-minimalist director Robert Bresson wrote, “Be as ignorant of what you are going to catch as is a fisherman of what is at the end of his fishing rod.” In 2017, at breakfast, Alexander Payne says, “Lookit—a screenplay takes six months to write, a movie takes a couple years to make. So, sure, these thoughts come up during the process. But you come to stories instinctively, not intellectually. You put your net in the water, and when you finally catch one, you say, ‘Oh, let’s do this. I wanna eat this fish.’”

Our meeting ends with Payne advising me, after a conversation about the relative virtues of the deliberative and leap-first approaches to life, to read Nikos Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek (“The movie is very good, but read the book. It’s philosophy encased in a narrative. He has a lot of wisdom about impetuous decisions versus overthinking things. Wise men and grocers, they weigh everything, he says.”) and then asking if we could “cut this short” so that he can drive back up the hill and go back to bed.

Jeremy Liebman

When I see Payne again in August, he’s making final tweaks to Downsizing’s sound mix on his favorite dub stage, which is in the basement of a private home in the Hollywood Hills. It’s Necktie Tuesday, a long-standing and self- explanatory tradition on Alexander Payne productions. The ties externalize an atmosphere of formalized, semi-ironic politeness and congeniality that you sense is the norm in Payne’s tight circle of collaborators—many of whom, like Kevin Tent and soundtrack composer Rolfe Kent, have been working with Payne for more than twenty years—no matter what day it is. People address one another as “Buddy” or “Doctor”; Payne is “A. P.,” whether he’s being directly addressed or merely mentioned.

They face the screen—on which a hungover Damon is listening to a groovy Serbian black marketeer, played by Christoph Waltz, explain how he became a purveyor of “luxury items for the small consumer”—and converse like barbers chatting at adjacent stations while keeping their eyes on the mirror. They use precisely inexact technical language that makes zero sense out of context: “Just a skosh . . .”

“A little more less . . .”

“We’re tickling . . .”

“Now, what about placement of thunk?”

Tent takes notes on a legal pad with a John Wick 2 pencil. A gag lands too neatly for Payne’s taste, and the director punctuates it with a sarcastic Jimmy Durante Hot cha-cha-cha-chahhh, and so goes the process by which an Alexander Payne comedy is slowly and carefully tickled into being. It’s a little boring to watch, but for Payne—who finds writing movies arduous and directing them often stressful but refers to the editing room as “the promised land”—this is the most purely enjoyable part of making films.

“It’s so nice,” he says, “to be carving the turkey, or putting the frosting on it, or whatever example you want to use.”

He’s always tried to spread that joy around. On Citizen Ruth, Tent says, they’d invite people from the cast and crew over every Friday night, have martinis, and screen bits of what they’d shot. These days, interns and PAs on a Payne production are taught how to mix a perfect martini. “They get really good,” Tent says. “They become artists.”

Later, I will call Laura Dern on the phone, and she will laugh knowingly about Payne and his crew, and talk with great affection about what it’s like to be part of this “necktie-wearing coven.”

“You know when you find your tribe,” Dern says. “And your tribe has a very specific sensibility. That’s the thing that excites me the most, about being around this tribe of boys—with Alexander, with Jim Taylor, with Kevin. We all seem to have very similar taste about broken and funny. The pain of the truth, and the humor of the truth. It’s rare that people see it in the same way, and when they do, you hold on tight, y’know?”

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Matt Damon points out that Payne’s hyperconviviality has creative benefits as well.

“He loves directing extras,” Damon says. “He watches extras. You can actually ask him. He’s got favorite performances by extras in movies. This is totally true. He’s obsessed with background, and having it feel real, and not like somebody who’s getting a hundred bucks to just walk from one side of the room to the other. He wants the person to have a whole story, and to know why. He sits and he talks them through these little vignettes: ‘Arthur, would you mind holding, uh, Jennifer’s hand there, and maybe turn and look at her. Maybe you’re married. And what if you had a fight last night, but you both want to make up?’

“So there’s all this real life,” Damon continues, “happening behind the central action. It speaks to that gentlemanly quality that he has. He just really wants to make sure that nobody feels left out and everybody feels valued, and that everybody’s enjoying the work, and that the work doesn’t have to be horrible and hard.”

Payne married Sideways actress Sandra Oh in 2003; they divorced in 2006. In 2015, he married Maria Kontou, a Greek philologist he met while visiting Aigio, a port city in Western Greece that happens to be the birthplace of Payne’s grandfather, Nicholas Papadopoulos. “I am Michael Corleone,” Payne says somewhat sheepishly.

Nick Papadopoulos became Nick Payne and arrived in Omaha around 1913. He married a woman born in Nebraska to German immigrants who’d arrived there in the 1890s. Payne’s mother, the former Peggy Constantine, was born in Birmingham, Alabama, to parents who’d moved there from Greece and ran a chain of barbecue restaurants in town. Peggy still lives in Omaha, in a neighborhood called Dundee, alone in the house Payne and his brothers grew up in, which his parents bought in 1956. Her neighbors include a prominent local businessman named Warren Buffett, who lives three blocks away in a house he bought in 1958. (“Change comes slowly to Dundee,” Payne shrugs.) Nick Payne ran a twenty-four-hour restaurant in downtown Omaha; his son, George, worked there for the last seventeen years of that restaurant’s existence, until it burned down in 1969. George Payne went on to become a regional field director for the U. S. Department of Commerce, working to encourage export from Nebraska and the Dakotas. I ask what gets exported from Nebraska and the Dakotas.

Alamy, Everett Collection

“The big thing from Nebraska is center-pivot irrigation,” Payne says. “You know when you fly over the country and you see those circles? That’s from irrigation. That’s a huge export from Nebraska—the actual machinery. Uh, what the hell else—I can’t remember what gets exported. But shit does.”

It wasn’t a family of creative types; Payne fell into movies because he loved them. He had a little eight-millimeter projector that Kraft had sent the restaurant as a promotional item. He was watching and collecting old films as early as age four, and had a particular affection for silent movies.

“So I’m about to have a daughter this fall, a child,” he says. “And I was thinking—up to age eight, only silent films. From eight to twelve, talkies. And then on the child’s twelfth birthday, color. That’s what I’m thinking.”

(I point out that this is an amazing plan, and that it will go out the window the minute the kid is old enough to pick up an iPad on her own, to which Payne responds, thoughtfully, “Shut up.” He doesn’t want to say anything else on the record about impending fatherhood, although he will answer questions about it off the record, seemingly because refusing to do so would be rude.)

He majored in Spanish and Latin American literature and history at Stanford, thought he’d be a journalist, imagined himself as the Buenos Aires bureau chief for The New York Times, a correspondent for El País or Le Monde. He took the LSAT but ultimately chose to apply to film school, not law school, and picked UCLA over USC because it seemed less like a “feeder” program for Hollywood, a decision that ended up not mattering much: After an industry screening of Payne’s thesis film—The Passion of Martin, a fifty- minute short loosely based on Ernesto Sabato’s novel El Túnel—Hollywood came looking for him anyway. The Los Angeles Times ran an article about every agent and producer in town wanting to be in the Alexander Payne business.

“But here’s the deal,” Payne says. “They don’t tell you in film school, when you show your film at the end-of-the-year screenings, to make sure you have the script for what you want to be your first feature. No one ever does that. We’re too busy editing our films. Who has time to write a feature? But that principle continues throughout one’s professional life. When you have a movie come out, you’re always in the best position if you have the feature ready for your next film. You can get it fast-tracked. That never changes—and I’ve never done it.”

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He was twenty-nine. He signed a deal with Universal, wrote a screenplay no one wanted to make—The Coward, about a retired Omaha insurance adjuster on what Payne once described as “a futile journey of self-discovery.” He and Taylor wrote soft-core shorts for the Playboy Channel, which was how Payne first met Rolfe Kent and his longtime production designer Jane Stewart. Eventually—as if to dissipate whatever remained of his industry heat— Payne left L. A. entirely.

“I moved to a town where I didn’t know a soul,” he says. “I had to go to the dark side of the moon. It was an eight-month vipassana in Chico, California.”

And then, at some point, either Payne or Taylor came across a news item about a young, drug-addicted mother of six children who’d been offered $10,000 not to abort her seventh. It’s the kind of story you have to be a certain kind of writer to see as grist for a comedy, but that’s where Payne and Taylor took it, in a screenplay called Citizen Ruth. It found its way to Laura Dern, already an Oscar nominee and one of the stars of the then-forthcoming blockbuster Jurassic Park, who called them and said she had to play the lead in their abortion comedy.

“I think it’s the only time in my career I was ever that direct,” she says. “Which [Alexander] found, I think, really hilarious.”

Citizen Ruth is a riotously funny movie whose portrayal of the pro-choice and pro-life movements as fueled by the same mix of idealism and cynicism flirts with false equivalence, although Dern’s performance could power a train. Election followed in 1999, an in-retrospect staggeringly great year for pop cinema in which a score of future A-list directors either debuted or made mainstream inroads: David Fincher (Fight Club), David O. Russell (Three Kings), Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia), Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich), the Wachowski siblings (The Matrix), M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense).

One key difference between Payne and these directors—or his other rough contemporaries, like Wes Anderson, director of 1998’s Rushmore, and Quentin Tarantino—is that he’s old-fashionedly sparing in his use of creative elements his peers tend to just dump into the batter, such as pop-music cues. He’s made seven movies in which no one fires a gun.

“Other movies can have violence,” Payne says. “I lament that most American films anticipate a climax of violence. A climax could be so many things. A climax could be an act of kindness, an act of betrayal. It could be anything. Why does it always have to be a gun? It just seems a little lazy. But I love film noir. I love westerns. You know, Ingmar Bergman would only watch kung fu movies.”

"Most American films anticipate a climax of violence. Why does it always have to be a gun?"

After Election, Payne and Taylor were hired to adapt About Schmidt, a novel by Louis Begley about a widowed New York lawyer who disapproves of his daughter’s fiancé. They wound up pulling out Payne’s eleven-year-old script for The Coward and rewriting it with a few plot points borrowed from Begley’s book; Begley would later tell The New Yorker he wasn’t sure what an RV was. In the film, released in 2002, Payne gets a marvelously dialed-down performance out of Jack Nicholson as Schmidt—beefy and thwarted under a gray comb-over, his explosive temper deweaponized and turned inward.

From there you probably know Payne’s arc—Sideways in 2004, an Oscar for Sideways the following year. Every movie he’s directed since then has made money. Movie stars beg to work with him, even though Payne seems to delight in finding humiliating, un-movie-starrish things for them to do—think of Election, with Matthew Broderick washing his ass in preparation for an extramarital motel tryst, or The Descendants, which is essentially a film about how funny George Clooney looks while trying to run in flip-flops. (“I completely nakedly and unashamedly asked him when we could work together again,” says Damon, who performs one of his big scenes in Downsizing with a bald cap covering his eyebrows. “Normally, I’m a little cooler than that.”)

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But I’m curious about Schmidt, and The Coward, and why this script was important enough for Payne to return to. It was written when he was coming out of film school hot, starting a career and a life—and yet there he was, thinking ahead to the plight of a man facing the end of a life, and the regret that comes with it.

“Well, if you wish to live a life,” Payne says, “and avoid future regret, maybe it’s not a bad thing to think about.”

This isn’t his predisposition, he says, not really.

“But certainly one’s greatest fear is to die with regret. Which is impossible—you’ll always die with regret, I think. Unmaximized potential will always haunt you.”

Then it’s September, and Payne is in New York, grabbing a late lunch at a tiny table in the open window of a tapas place around the corner from the Criterion Collection offices in Union Square, where he’s just spent the morning helping color- correct a forthcoming Criterion edition of Election. His friend Ann Beeder has been hanging out with him in the editing room and joins us for lunch. Beeder is a Cornell professor and psychiatrist who’s known Payne since high school. She’s as acerbic and fast as he is, maybe even faster—Payne doesn’t seem to have many friends who aren’t intimidatingly quick-witted.

There’s a car waiting to take Payne to JFK one hour from now, so he can fly to Greece and have a baby. His passport is in his shirt pocket. He orders a bottle of rosé, a salad, a razor-clam appetizer. We talk, wrapping up loose threads. I tell him what Laura Dern said about him maybe growing kinder to his characters. “Who am I to contradict Laura Dern?” Payne says. I impart that her dream was to someday sit next to him at a film festival and see him shed a tear for poor Ruth Stoops.

“That’s never going to happen,” Payne says. “She’s out of her fucking mind. You know dames—they get all sentimental on you.”

The dedication at the end of Downsizing reads for George—not Payne’s father George, who died in May 2014, but Payne’s older brother, George H. Payne II, an emergency-room doctor who died of pancreatic cancer seven months later, at sixty-one. “Very unlike me,” Payne says when asked about this gesture. “I put it, quite discreetly, at the very, very, very end of the film.”

He says that he misses his brother and wishes he’d gotten to see the movie; when asked why that is, he repeats his previous answer. But it stands to reason that there’s some George in Damon’s character, Paul, who’s not a doctor but ministers to the sick as best he can. In many ways, Downsizing is Payne’s most doom-filled story, but it ends on a profoundly uncynical note, implying that even in a world beyond repair, no action taken to ameliorate the suffering of others is entirely wasted. Its final shot, I suggest to Payne, is more definitive than those of Schmidt and Sideways, which both leave their protagonists on the verge— but only on the verge—of getting over their own bullshit.

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“Sideways has a nice ending,” Payne says. “That one has a nice ending.”

Downsizing has a nice ending, too, he acknowledges. He’d rather not discuss what that might indicate about the current outlook of the man who cowrote and directed it, steering the conversation about the last shot in the film away from the personal and back to movie love, where he’s safer.

“I like those Fellini movies that follow one character through a series of circumstances, often very different circumstances, episodic circumstances, and then the movie ends on a close-up of that person’s face,” he says. “You see it at the end of Nights of Cabiria. Certainly at the end of La Dolce Vita. I like those endings. Even La Strada. The guy on the beach. That face. That’s sublime.”

A waiter asks if we need anything else. “Do you have any wine left?” Payne asks. The waiter says the bottle’s empty. Payne says, “Oh, really? You’re sure you guys didn’t?” And the waiter replies, “Poured it. Every drop.”

Payne orders everyone an espresso. In a minute he’ll pay the check and get in his car and drive to the airport and fly to Greece, and everything will change for him. Or nothing will. Who knows? We talk about silent movies some more. Payne is both proud and aghast that when he goes to see silent films projected at festivals, he never finds other working directors there.

Paramount Pictures

I think about this, and the neckties and the martinis, and Payne’s country-courtly way of speaking—Lookit—and the way his actual films eschew pop-culture references and iPod-shuffle soundtracks. And the thing Payne once said about how he writes parts for actors who are unavailable by dint of being dead—Warren Schmidt for William Holden, the Bruce Dern part in Nebraska for Henry Fonda or Warren Oates. And the thing Payne once said about how he could take or leave the cinema of the eighties in toto except for To Live and Die in L. A. and Amadeus. A lot of what I’ve learned about you, I say to Payne—it ends up being my last point—is leading me toward this characterization of you as a man out of time.

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Payne says. Beeder is having none of it, though.

“No,” she says, and then cuts right to the core of it. (Note to self: Bring an off-duty psychiatrist to every interview from now on.) “Alexander has always been the coolest person in the room.”

“For nerds,” Payne protests.

“No,” she says, “not even for nerds. For anybody. In Omaha, the whole city lives and dies by what he says and does.”

“Yeah, well,” Payne says. “Omaha doesn’t count.”

I can’t say who’s right. But imagine being the coolest person in the room. Imagine always having to keep that up, even as new information lashes your sense of reality. If that reserve defined you, you’d do anything to safeguard it. You’d scoff at Omaha, if it came to that. You’d contradict Laura Dern. Your heart could break and break again, and heal, and swell, and you’d deny it to the end.

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